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en-usEngadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronicsCopyright 2018 AOL Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only.https://www.tuaw.com/2013/01/04/mountain-lion-is-king-of-the-os-x-jungle/https://www.tuaw.com/2013/01/04/mountain-lion-is-king-of-the-os-x-jungle/https://www.tuaw.com/2013/01/04/mountain-lion-is-king-of-the-os-x-jungle/#comments

As noted by Macworld UK, Apple's OS X Mountain Lion has clawed its way to the top of the OS X jungle. It was released on July 25, 2012 and as of this past December it's installed on 32 percent of all Macs online. That percentage is according to Net Applications, a web-measurement firm that tracks operating system usage by analyzing visitors to 40,000 websites.

That number represents a 3 percent increase for the OS from November, when 10.8 was running on 29 percent of all Macs online. That gain came mostly at the expense of OS X 10.7 Lion, which sank from 30 percent to 28 percent. Mountain Lion also stole one percentage point from OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which is now actually in second place, accounting for 29 percent of all Macs.

Net Applications doesn't expect any future Mac operating system to ever crack a 50 percent share. That's due to Apple's new annual OS X update cycle. If OS X 10.7 and 10.8 are any indication, Apple should announce the 10.9 beta some time this spring with the official release coming in July.

To be sure, I think OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is the best OS Apple has ever released. It feels like a completed version of what Mac OS X 10.7 Lion should have been. It's fast, it's clean, it melds some iOS concepts to OS X and, for the most part, it just works.

That being said, no OS is entirely perfect and there are some gripes my colleagues an I have about Mountain Lion. We've compiled them into the list below. Now, most of these gripes are minor and they'll probably be corrected in future updates like 10.8.1 -- at least, we hope so.

After reading through the list (which may grow) feel free to add your own gripes in the comments. And please, don't let this list of minor gripes put you off the OS. It really is the best one Apple has ever released.

Mail

Wobbly scroll on external monitor.

No "Reply to sender."

Signature sticks when changing accounts (Exchange only).

Calendar

Accepts invitations in the top calendar, not the default Exchange calendar (and not the account that received them).

Displays menubar

Mirroring only.

Notification Center

@mention tweets don't show from people you don't follow.

Notification Center/Mail

Clicking on an email message in Notification Center should take you to that specific email's inbox in Mail, NOT the universal inbox for all your different email accounts.

Safari

Under Safari>Preferences>Passwords the list of websites and your usernames should probably be hidden until you enter your administrator password. The passwords are already hidden by default but it seems like a security problem when anybody using your computer could see what websites you go to and what your usernames for the websites are. Knowing your usernames gives them one less thing to hack. Not to mention it tells people exactly which sites they should target you at since they know you're a member of the sites by looking in Safari's preferences.

Safari JavaScript bugs render some websites unusable.

Loss of RSS button in Safari means users have to jump through several hoops to subscribe to feeds. They also have to spend money to buy Reeder for Mac (or another RSS reader).

Stock Widget

You can no longer rearrange the order of stocks.

Stocks don't sync with Stocks app on iOS devices (they never did, but they should).

General:

Numerous graphical "tearing" issues throughout the OS on the MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Most prevalent in TextEdit and Mail.

"Open Recent" has disappeared from opening dialog splash box in many apps, most notably iWork apps.

We've seen plenty of users report that Apple's latest OS, Mountain Lion, has caused a massive drop in battery life. While we haven't been able to confirm any decrease in longevity with our own OS 10.8 machines, which include previous generation MacBook Pros and the company's latest Retina model, it's clear that some of you who were able to get the operating system downloaded and installed have experienced some not-so-favorable side effects with your Pros and MacBook Airs. While there are plenty of theories, there has yet to be a fix, though Apple is reportedly investigating the issue. This isn't the first time users have reported decreased battery life after an OS update, with a lengthy support thread popping up after Lion's release last year. So, how has the upgrade affected you? Sound off in the poll below to let us know.%Poll-76894%

We heard some rumblings ahead of the weekend from third-party sources, and like clockwork, Apple has kicked the week off with its weekend box office returns. According to Cupertino's numbers, the latest version of OS X hit 3 million downloads in four days, making for "the most successful OS X release in Apple's history." Price has surely played a role in Mountain Lion's speedy success, running $20 for 200-plus features, according to Apple's numbers. That list includes big additions like Notification Center and AirPlay Mirroring and a selection of smaller tweaks to the decade-old operating system. More information can be found in the customarily self-congratulatory press release, after the break.

You can make the "Save As..." menu item more visible and easier to use simply by giving it a different keyboard shortcut.

In 10.7 (Lion), Apple removed the 'Save As' menu item and replaced it with "Duplicate" which did not work the same way. Apple relented in 10.8 (Mountain Lion) by returning "Save As..." but they hid it as an optional menu item which would only be shown when you held down the Option key while looking at the "File" menu. (There is also a keyboard shortcut for "Save As..." in 10.8, but it is not very convenient: Command + Shift + Option + S.)

Fortunately for us, there is a very easy way to make "Save As..." more visible: just change its keyboard shortcut. I'm going to show you two different ways that you can do that (you only need to choose one).

Option 1. Terminal.app If you are comfortable using Terminal.app, you can add a different keyboard shortcut this with one simple line. First, quit all your apps except Finder and Terminal. Then paste this command (as one line) into Terminal.app (and press Return):

That's it!

Launch TextEdit and open the 'File' menu and you should see "Save As..." back in its rightful spot with its original Command + Shift + S shortcut, as shown in the image above.

Aside: After you enter the 'defaults write' command, you will not see any confirmation that it was entered correctly. Terminal.app is a little terse sometimes. If you want to verify it from the command-line, enter this:

defaults read -globalDomain NSUserKeyEquivalents

and look for "Save As..." = "@$s"; in the output.

Option 2. System Preferences.app If you would rather not use Terminal, it's still very easy to add the keyboard shortcut.

Launch the System Preferences.app, then open the "Keyboard" preference pane.

At the top you will see "Keyboard" and "Keyboard Shortcuts" – click "Keyboard Shortcuts" (labeled '1' below). Then in the list on the left side, click "Application Shortcuts" (labeled '2' below). Then click the "+" button (labeled '3' below):

Once you press that "+" button, a small window will appear asking you to enter the title of the menu item and the keyboard shortcut that you want to use.

Enter "Save As..." in the "Menu Title:" field, and then press the keyboard shortcut that you want to use. In the example below I pressed Command + Shift + S:

Note: It used to be true that you had to enter an actual ellipsis (which you can get by pressing Option + ; on a US-English keyboard). However, when I tested this in Mac OS X 10.8.2, it worked with three consecutive periods.

Bonus Tip: Hide the "Duplicate" menu item.

In my original article I suggested that you also enter a keyboard shortcut for "Duplicate" and while you can do that if you wish, you do not need to do that.

However, if you would like to hide the Duplicate menu item, you can do that. There are two steps: first, remap "Save As..." to Command + Shift + S (as shown above). Then the 'trick' is to remap "Duplicate" to Command + Shift + Option + S.

What you will have done is swap the keyboard shortcuts for "Duplicate" and "Save As..." which means that OS X will make "Duplicate" the optional command. If you open the "File" menu and hold down "Option" the "Save As..." command will change to "Duplicate"

(Thanks to TUAW reader 'rbascuas' for pointing this out in response to the original article!)

Important Addendum: "Keep changes in original document"

As we reported in August 2012, the "Save As..." command in early versions of 10.8 had an unexpected and likely unwanted side effect in Mountain Lion: it would save the changes in the new document (created by "Save As...") but would also save the changes to the original document.

However, Apple realized that users might not want that behavior, so in Mac OS X 10.8.2 they added an option "Keep changes in original document" which you can see here:

Option A:If you want to save the changes you've made in the document and then save the document with a different name, then make sure that the box is checked.

Option B:If you want your original document to stay as it was when you last saved it and create a new document based on the modified content of that document, then make sure that box is not checked.

If you do not see the 'Keep changes in original document' box, then the application is probably going to give you the "Option B" behavior, but if you are not sure, I would suggest choosing Cancel in the "Save" dialog, then copy and paste the contents of the document into a new file, and save the new file. I know that's several extra-and-less-convenient steps, but if you are worried about preserving the original document, better safe than sorry.

You could also save the file, duplicate it in Finder, and rename the new instance. Open old file and revert to previous save using 'Versions'.

Frankly,I wish that Apple had just left the "Save As..." command alone, but for some reason they didn't ask my opinion. That said, I'm glad that they brought it back in Mountain Lion. I would have paid $20 for that feature alone.

Cue the video of 10.7 walking off into the sunset. Today is Mountain Lion day, and with the arrival of the new operating system comes the departure of its predecessor. Clicking the link for Lion will bring up a "The item you've requested is not currently available" error message in the Mac App Store. Thankfully, Mountain Lion is just one $20 download away for Lion and Snow Leopard users alike.

Barely a year after the release of Lion, this new OS nevertheless boasts an impressive list of new features. The overriding theme is unchanged from the release of OS X 10.7 before it: "Back to the Mac." In other words, a selective migration of the best bits of iOS to its big brother.

I am not going to attempt to exhaustively work my way through all two hundred plus features and write in detail about each and every one. The plan is to hit the highlights, tell you what's changed, and let you know why that's a good thing -- unless it isn't. In which case, I'll tell you why not. Think of this as the amuse-bouche to Ars Technica and John Siracusa's no-expense-spared tasting menu.

Everyone sitting comfortably? Do you have a tasty beverage and/or the read-it-laterservice of your choice to hand? Then I'll begin with these basic facts:

You don't need to have installed Lion -- you can upgrade from Snow Leopard (but only the very last 10.6.8 sub-version) to Mountain Lion directly.

First up: the bottom line

There's some ways in which Mountain Lion is undeserving of big excitement -- or a full-on review. Since OS X 10.5 Leopard, Apple has changed its process for OS X upgrades; we're now getting vaguely-annual upgrades with healthy numbers of extra features for relatively modest $20-30 costs, rather than the near-biennial major upgrades of the past that cost more than $100.

As such, there's barely a decision matrix for the upgrade; if even a small number of the significant new features will be useful to you, Mountain Lion is a no-brainer. Similarly, the second some hot app you want ships that won't work on Lion, that's a no brainer too (for me, that'll be Tweetbot for Mac, which will be 10.8-only once it leaves public alpha).

So if your question is "is Mountain Lion worth the twenty bucks?" then the answer is "yup." You likely all guessed that, which is why I thought I'd put it up here and not leave you in suspense.

If your question is "what should I expect from Mountain Lion?" then keep reading. Hopefully I'll show you a few things to get excited about. It's a great update.

If your question is "should I install it right now?!" then read the next section very carefully.

Safety first

Apple's routine updates to OS X might have lulled you into a false sense of security. Don't let that happen. This isn't iOS; Macs aren't backed up to an always-on iCloud safety net and Macs can be customised in a hundred thousand ways (yay!), which means there's a hundred thousand ways for an OS upgrade to go wrong (boo!).

First, consider waiting, for a few days if not longer. Some nasty problems have been known to slip past Apple's testers and into the wilds, and something you rely on -- some small utility or a printer driver or somesuch -- may not yet be updated to work with the new OS. 10.8 isn't that different from 10.7, so you're unlikely to have significant problems; nevertheless it might be worth looking through the Roaring Apps Wiki to check your apps will still work.

If you make any part of your living with your Mac, upgrade this advice from "consider" to "I strongly urge you to consider."

Second, backup, backup, backup. You should be doing this anyway, but I like to take a second backup before installing major operating system upgrades. On the Mac, my process is:

Using Carbon Copy Cloner or a similar app, take a snapshop of my Mac's drive to a USB device.

Reboot the Mac, holding down the Option key to make the "select boot device" menu appear.

Select the USB device to boot the freshly backed up copy of OS X.

Make sure it's all fully working.

Reboot back to my normal OS X disk.

Disconnect the USB drive, and maybe even your Time Machine drive too.

Proceed with the upgrade.

If you follow this process, you can have peace of mind that the upgrade can't permanently damage any of your data.

Spec wars

Not every Mac can have Mountain Lion. As with all of Apple's upgrades, some older hardware has fallen by the wayside and will never advance past OS X 10.7 -- unless some enterprising hackers come up with workarounds, that is.

There's some weird non-linear stuff at work here, with iMacs as old as 2007 working while Mac minis as recent as 2009 don't. Ars Technica suggests this is down to graphics cards that have 64-bit compatible drivers. This theory aligns with the most common distinguishing characteristic of the Mountain Lion-capable models; they are the first of their range to use Nvidia graphics, with the model immediately that came before them using ATI or Intel graphics.

Your Mac will also need a minimum of 2 GB of RAM, although we'd suggest that 4 GB is a more workable amount these days. Apple's spec sheet says Mountain Lion needs 8 GB of disk space, but again it's wise to have some extra headroom. You're also going to be downloading the 4.4 GB Mountain Lion installer from the Mac App Store so you'll need still more disk space to put it in, and hopefully a fast Internet connection too.

More annoyingly for most people, AirPlay Mirroring has much tighter requirements, because it requires a beefy graphics chipset for reliable realtime encoding, and to create the encrypted video stream that's sent to the Apple TV. It won't work on MacBook Pros before the Early 2011 model or other Macs from before Mid 2011. Our own Erica Sadun has some tips on working around these limitations.

i(can see clearly now the)Cloud is here

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At the WWDC keynote in 2011, Steve Jobs said: "We're going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device. We're going to move your hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud." That vision comes a good deal closer with Mountain Lion, which drives iCloud deep into the operating system.

It's almost everywhere you look, in fact. Firstly, there's settings and metadata syncing. A single sign-in with your Apple ID when you first boot Mountain Lion can immediately configure a wide range of settings and preferences in the following list of apps: (deep breath) Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Messages, FaceTime, Game Center, Safari, Reminders, iTunes, the Mac App Store, and Notes. Phew.

This works exactly how you'd think it would; any of those apps that have content in the cloud, whether from your iOS device or another Mac running Mountain Lion, have access to that content. So immediately after booting 10.8 for the first time, you can pull up Reminders and see your to-do list, or Contacts and see your friends. Your Mail signatures, rules, account settings, etc are synchronized. Any Safari instance can see all the pages open on every other Safari instance -- across iPad, iPhone, or Mac. And so on.

It's... well, it's all very much like iOS, in the best possible sense of the word. Fuss-free and frictionless and, when you stop to think about it, probably how we all wanted these bread-and-butter productivity apps to behave along.

One thing I'd like to put on my wishlist for future iOS/OS X versions: I don't particularly care for the actual apps for either Reminders or Notes. When Apple opened up the fully-featured Event Kit API for working with calendar entries on iOS, it encouraged the creation of an entire subcategory of alternate calendar apps (I'm partial to Calvetica, myself). All of these apps still use the built-into-iOS calendar, so they get iCloud sync for free. I'd like to see similar APIs for the reminders and notes facilities, so that we can see a similar ecosystem of alternate apps for these too.

iCloud isn't just about settings and preferences though...

You got your cloud in my documents

A number of Mountain Lion apps, such as Preview and TextEdit, will offer to store your documents over there somewhere (waves hands vaguely in the direction of North Carolina) and enable you to access them "from anywhere", where "anywhere" really means "a Mac or iOS device signed in to your Apple ID running the same app as you used to create the file in the first place." For example, as far as I can tell, documents synced to the cloud from TextEdit and Preview don't appear to be accessible by any apps on iOS 5 or 6, so that syncing is only meaningful between Macs running Mountain Lion.

(An aside: Apple's website clearly shows screenshots of Pages with the same iCloud support. As I write this iWork still doesn't support Documents in the Cloud, although it seems a safe bet that Apple will push an update to the iWork apps the day Mountain Lion goes live. You also can't see TextEdit or Preview files in the iCloud.com web interface -- only iWork ones are visible. Similarly, though, I can't rule out Apple updating that site when Mountain Lion is released.)

Documents in the Cloud has a very iOS-style interface. In supported apps the normal Open File dialog has an alternate view with a linen backdrop, chunky thumbnails, and a simple one-level-deep-only folder system for grouping files, just like app folders in iOS and Launchpad.

Syncing is done in the background, so you can work with your files even if your Mac is disconnected from the Internet; changes will be uploaded when you next connect. It's certainly simpler than the full hierarchal folder system us Mac users have been accustomed to until now, and it's a very different approach to that taken by cloud syncing solutions that look like a normal folder, like Dropbox and Apple's older iDisk.

Working with Mountain Lion installs on both my MacBook Pro and my iMac, I put Documents in the Cloud through its paces. First, I created a document on one Mac; within seconds, it was visible on the other. Leaving it open in TextEdit on the first Mac, I made some edits on the second. Within a couple of seconds, I saw the first Mac's TextEdit window automatically update with the latest text.

Then I got sneaky. I disabled Wifi on both Macs, and made conflicting edits in both files. When I reconnected them, a dialog window appeared pointing out that my modifications were out of sync, giving me the timestamps of each file, and asking me which one I wanted to keep.

Once I selected my preferred version, however, the other was deleted. If I wanted to keep both sets of edits -- suppose it was a blog post I'd been writing and I wanted to manually merge parts of both documents into one new one -- I'd be out of luck. If I was using Dropbox instead, then I'd be protected in two different ways; firstly, Dropbox's default behavior is to create "(conflicted copy)" duplicate files, so you can retrieve other copies of the file. Secondly, Dropbox maintains version history for all files through its web interface, so you can recover older versions of files. Documents in the Cloud offers neither of these niceties.

Another area where things get less clear-cut is if you want to open a file created in one app (e.g. TextEdit) in another (e.g. Pages). As it stands, you have to open the file in TextEdit first, then save it to the Mac's filesystem. Then open it in Pages again, and save it back to iCloud, but within Pages. Now you have two copies of the file in iCloud and a third on your Mac, all in mutually incompatible silos; you have to manually track which one is the current version.

Similarly, if you download a document from iCloud through the web interface (perhaps to edit it on someone else's Mac or a Windows machine), you have no means to upload it again -- you have to do something clunky such as emailing it to yourself so you can re-add it from one of your own devices. In seeking to make "the computer for the rest of us" simpler for basic Mac users, Apple has perhaps made things more complicated for the rest of us experienced OS X operators.

Documents in the Cloud also doesn't address my biggest gripe with this sort of lightweight app-oriented file system, which is that I can't group together related files of different types (say, a spreadsheet with some financial calculations and a word processor document with the report that summarises the figures). Is this because I'm a stuck-in-my-ways curmudgeon? Yeah, very possibly. Of course, the traditional filesystem is still there (and alternative cloud syncing solutions exist), so we're all free to each make up our minds.

One final note -- Documents in the Cloud support is restricted to Mac applications distributed through the Mac App Store. That's a defensible decision on Apple's part; iCloud gives every user a generous 5 GB of space for free, which is certainly not free for Apple to host, and commercial App Store apps generate some income for Apple to offset that. However, with Apple's sandboxing rules leading to some devs removing their apps from or never putting their apps into the App Store, that could turn out to be an irritating limitation for end users.

isn't really important." "iMessage: because message delivery order

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As you are doubtless aware, the previously-available-in-betaMessages app is now baked into OS X. It has had some UI re-arrangements and tweaks, but it's not fundamentally different; if you used the beta you won't be surprised by anything you find here -- although it certainly seems to crash less. If you didn't use the beta, it's pretty much exactly what you expect anyway: functionally equivalent to iChat with the addition of New! And! Improved! iMessage support.

Messages has noble goals. It tries to unify your send-short-pieces-of-text-to-friends into one app, whether the friend is using is a traditional instant messaging system (it supports AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, just like the old iChat) or the newfangled iMessage (that semi-replaced SMS in iOS 5). Like most multi-protocol instant messenger clients, Messages does a decent job of to unifying these different protocols behind a neat interface. For example, the indication of which network a chat uses is handled via light grey text in the message field itself, just like how Messages on iOS says "Text Message" or "iMessage" before you start typing.

Video calling is also supported, with all chats having a "start video" button at the top right, with one tiny oddity. For AIM, Jabber, Google Talk and Bonjour, you chat within the Messages interface. But for iMessage contacts, the standalone FaceTime app launches instead.

So far, so good. Messages is somewhat let down by wrinkles in the iMessage backend though, and I don't think Apple has all those problems licked yet.

Consider my initial experiment on starting Messages for the first time. I was already chatting with two of my friends via my iPhone. I happen to know that these two friends have their "caller ID" setting in iOS to be their phone number -- not their Apple ID email address. So when I am chatting with them on the phone, the iMessage servers are routing messages based on that number.

Being a sneaky sort, I started a Messages conversation on my Mac using their email addresses instead. It went wrong in exactly the way I thought it would -- on both my iPhone and my Mac, I now had two separate message threads, both with the same participants. If you don't understand the technicalities of what's going on behind the scenes, this is confusing; if you do understand them, it's still annoying.

In my time with 10.8, I couldn't reproduce the other rare-but-too-frequent ways I've seen iMessage freak out on my over the last nine months -- the missing messages; the delayed messages; the messages I'm told haven't been delivered but have; the messages I'm told have been delivered but haven't; and on one particularly memorable instance the messages that arrived in a different order than how they were sent. However, these are symptoms of issues on the backend iMessage service rather than the client, so there's no reason to believe the release of Mountain Lion is going to change anything. I live in hope that Apple is working behind the scenes to improve matters.

Finger on the pulse: Notification Center

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Notification Center is another of those "back to the Mac" features that was clearly derived from iOS, with a little bit of Growl mixed in for good measure. It's designed to be a unified system for every app that has to attract your attention to something, although the "unified" part is debatable because Notification Center, like iCloud, can only be used by apps distributed through the Mac App Store.

Notification Center is divided into two types of UI elements. The first are the pop-ups that appear when an app is trying to tell you something. Although conceptually similar to iOS, these are visually more like Growl -- small floating boxes that appear in the upper right corner of your screen. On an app-by-app basis, you can either turn these off, set them to "banners" (disappear on their own after a few seconds) or "alerts" (stay on the screen until you acknowledge them), as well as the option to play an alert sound or not.

Thus, you can create tiers of apps, giving the power to interrupt you only to those you value the most. When you really need to focus, you can drag the top bar of the Notification Center sidebar downwards to reveal a "turn all notifications off until tomorrow" setting. This is a thoughtful feature, although I wish it was a little more obvious; I overlooked it throughout most of my Mountain Lion testing.

The second part of the UI is the Notification Center itself, which is analogous to the pull-down display that iOS has. A click of the button in the menu bar icon in the top right corner of the screen, or a two-finger swipe leftwards from the right edge of your trackpad, will slide the whole of OS X to the left and let you peek at a long list of the various alerts and alarms and notifications that your Mac is asking you to see. As on iOS, there's a slightly-too-small close button to dismiss notifications on an app-by-app basis.

A quick aside about that two-finger-swipe gesture -- it feels very natural on a MacBook, where you can place your fingers on the casing of the laptop itself and swipe onto the trackpad. It initially feels a bit weird on a Magic Trackpad, however, as there's no casing to start from. To address this, Apple has made it fairly forgiving of what it considers to be "from the edge"; you can put two fingers anywhere on the rightmost half-inch or so of surface and swipe and it'll work. It feels awkward at first but stick with it and that'll soon pass.

One downside to Notification Center is the dreaded Beepocalypse. As I type this, I have my iPhone and iPad on my desk next to my iMac, where I am running Mountain Lion (with its built-in Twitter client -- more on that later) and Tweetbot for Mac. Every @-reply I receive on Twitter therefore results in four separate notifications. Or at least, it should -- only about 1-in-5 seems to be making it to Notification Center right now, although Mountain Lion isn't live yet so I'm not going to read anything into that.

It's really not clear what Apple could do about beepocalypses (beepocalypsii?). Perhaps future Apple hardware will incorporate something clever like NFC, or leverage Bluetooth in some manner, to sense when devices are close together and suppress extra notifications. That's not much of a solution, however. If my iPhone is in my hand and my iPad in my bag, I want notifications on the iPhone; if my phone is in my pocket and I'm looking at my iPad, the converse is true. Proximity doesn't really tell the devices enough to work out where my attention is, and hence where notifications should go.

Something involving iCloud syncing that removed "read" notifications on all devices when they were dealt with on one would help a lot, although there are still edge cases (such as Twitter notifications that come from mismatched clients). For now, I found that Notification Center encouraged me to re-evaluate exactly which apps were allowed to interrupt me, on which platforms, and in which ways (transient banners versus persistent alerts). I turned a few of the less important but chattier apps off and I've been a good deal happier since.

Notification Center also doesn't interact very well with Growl at the moment. At several points I saw overlaid Growl and Notification Center pop-ups appear on the screen, with one obscuring the other. Growl 2 will enhance support for this scenario, and doubtless we'll see more elegant support as 10.8 beds in and apps are updated, but for now it can get a little ugly, and you might want to move Growl's notifications from the default top-right corner.

One final curious footnote about the Notification Center UI: the drop shadow on the edge of the screen suggests that, on the Mac, Notification Center is "underneath" the main OS display -- whereas on iOS, it's rendered as if it's "over" it. This addresses Jake Marsh's insightful complaint that the use of linen as an "on top" texture in iOS in inconsistent.

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain

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Yet another fresh-from-iOS feature is Dictation, the Mac's new "take a letter, Maria" feature that promises high quality voice-to-text transcription throughout the operating system.

The first thing to note is that Dictation requires a live connection to the Internet to work. Indeed, as soon as you turn it on (it defaults to off), it warns you that "what you say is sent to Apple to be converted to text." Behind the scenes, it'll be using the same voice recognition algorithms as Siri.

It works in all apps; anywhere you can enter text, you can press the shortcut key (by default you double-tap the Fn "function key") to activate it and talk away. Once you're done, it thinks for moment and then your text appears. Or, at least, some approximation of your text.

So how good is it? I used the built-in microphone on my iMac, so there was no special hardware -- no fancy headset or similar -- and read the start of this section aloud in my mild Welsh accent. This is what came out:

Yet another fresh from iOS feature is dictation the maxim you take a letter Maria feature that promises voice to text transcription.

The first thing to know is the dictation required Connected to the Internet to work. Indeed, as it is usually on it defaults to off, it was you that "what you say centre apple to be converted to text. Quote be home

At that point, it cut me off -- it seems it has a limited buffer size. As you can see, accuracy isn't brilliant for me out of the box, but I've only been playing with it a little so it's had no opportunity to train to my voice yet. Apple claims it will improve with use. I'm also a difficult subject; I have a relatively uncommon regional accent and (even when I'm trying not to) I'm told I tend to talk fast and blur words together.

Let's have another go!

Sorry about the port was the colour of television, teams to invest channel. "It's not like I'm using," case you someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the chat. "It's like my policies are developed this massive drug deficiency."

That's supposed to be the opening sentences of Neuromancer by William Gibson:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. "It's not like I'm using," Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. "It's like my body's developed this massive drug deficiency."

It was at this point that I had the idea of taking the output of Dictation and looping it back through OS X's say command to feed it back into Dictation again, then feeding that output into say again, and so on to see what successive voice transcriptions would produce. I'm hoping to get purple monkey dishwasher out of it.

The skybox airport was the colour of television to intimidate shower
The skybox airport was the colour of televisions raising a shower
The skybox airport was the colour of televisions raising a shower

That was with the default Alex voice for the text-to-speech part, which is no longer the best OS X has to offer. Let's try another, using the higher quality "Daniel" UK English voice. This is the same synthetic voice as is used for Siri in the UK, that of voiceover artist Jon Briggs. (Bonus marks to any commenter who knows this quote.)

The house stood on a slight rise just on the edge of the village. It stood on its own and looked out over a broad spread of West Country farmland.
But I'll still likewise just unusual age is still has a look at overruled spread out west country farmer
Well still likewise just unusual ages still have a look at the morale spread out west country file
Well the likewise just unusually you still have a look at them all spread out west country file

I think Daniel speaks rather too quickly for Dictation...!

Despite that bit of fun, I could see Dictation being genuinely useful to anyone who doesn't feel a bit weird talking aloud to a computer (although I still haven't gotten over that), and extremely valuable to users who have difficulty typing due to physical impairment. I would particularly like to see Dictation expanded in the future to allow at least some modest amounts of control of the OS itself, rather than pure text entry; if Siri can send a text message, there's no fundamental reason my Mac can't create an entire email for me, not just the body text.

Dictation currently supports English (US, UK and Australian dialects), French, German, and Japanese. By a non-astonishing coincidence, these are the same languages Siri supports. Of course, if you're needing voice-to-text input in a scenario where you can't depend on your Internet access, Nuance's Dragon for Mac is available for $199.95 and will run on Mountain Lion (although apparently you have to temporarily turn Gatekeeper to 'low' to install it).

Sharing is caring

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Hey, look! A new feature in OS X that's been directly copied from iOS! Shocker.

In a roundabout way, though, Share buttons predate iOS and even OS X -- they come from NeXTSTEP, the Unix operating system that Apple acquired in 1997. The Services menu lurking in every menu bar of every app you have on your Mac was an early attempt to civilise the prehistoric Unix pipe (|) and bring it into the GUI age. The idea was to allow any app to generate data in some format (a word, a chunk of text, a file, an image, ...) and allow the user to send that data to any other app that could do something meaningful with it (look it up in a dictionary, spellcheck it, email it as an attachment, upload it to Flickr, ...).

The Services menu has generally skewed towards power users rather than civilians -- it's often filled with barely-coherent geek talk that make it not particularly approachable. The near-ubiquitous Share buttons in iOS are an attempt to further refine the idea by making it more obvious what it does, and to make that functionality more visible. As of 10.8, now they are on your Mac, too.

Every compatible app in Mountain Lion -- including Finder, Safari, Contacts, Notes, Photo Booth and Preview -- has a prominent, always-visible Share button. We can probably assume that updates to the iLife and iWork app suites that add Share buttons will be pushed out via the Mac App Store when Mountain Lion goes live. Clicking this new button displays a small menu of options that are linked to the content you are manipulating. (Interestingly, the 10.8 version of the menu is rather more staid than the jazzed-up iOS 6 version.)

So, if you click the button in Safari, then by default you are working with a link to the page you are on right now; the options that appear are Add to Reading List, Add Bookmark, Email this Page, Message, and Twitter. In Finder, however, you are by default working with one or more files so there, the options are Email, Message and AirDrop. If you select an image file, that menu has two extra options: Twitter and Flickr. Photo Booth has a particularly rich set of options: all the same file transfer methods as Finder, plus it offers Add to iPhoto, Add to Aperture, Set Account Picture, Set Buddy Picture, and Change Twitter Profile Picture.

As you can see, much of the functionality of the Share button relies on having pre-set account details for various online social sharing services. Out of the box, Mountain Lion supports Twitter -- just like iOS -- and adds Vimeo and Flickr. These accounts are configured in the Mail, Contacts & Calendars pane in System Preferences, where they appear as new account types. Apple says Facebook will be added to this list "in the fall."

As with iOS though, support for Twitter (and, soon, Facebook) goes deeper than just the Share buttons. Once you've added your account, Notification Center will start alerting you to direct messages and @-replies you receive on the service, and will gain a "Click to Tweet" button at the top of its UI that, unsurprisingly, allows you to sent a tweet. Similar features are promised for Facebook, sending status updates and so forth, with an important extra feature: contact synchronization. But again, this won't arrive until the fall, so we can't be sure how well it'll work yet.

One small annoying thing about the Twitter notifications: clicking on them (e.g. on a direct message you want to reply to) opens the Twitter web site. I could find no way of making them open in any native client, not even Twitter's own one. In light of Twitter's recent rumblings about becoming less third-party-friendly, that worries me a little because it feels like a strategy, rather that an oversight.

Another notable downside to this otherwise appealing feature is the lack of third party support. If you use Flickr then you're fine, but if you prefer, say, 500px or Smugmug then you're out of luck. We can theorise that Apple will, in time, expand the sharing functionality to allow third parties to add their own data handlers in there; otherwise, we'll be forever stuck with just Apple's pre-approved choices, which will inevitably miss out some smaller sites that someone, somewhere wants.

AirPlay: video almost everywhere

My thesaurus is exhausted, spent, consumed. I'm going to say it plain: this is another new Mountain Lion feature lifted directly from iOS and grafted into OS X.

AirPlay Mirroring, as Apple is careful to refer to it, gives your Mac the same ability to route its display to a second- or third-generation Apple TV on your network that you already enjoy on your iPad or iPhone. It's absolutely trivial to set up: if you have compatible devices, an AirPlay icon should show up on your Mac menu bar automatically. Click it, select the device you want to mirror to, and you're all set.

AirPlay performed well in my testing, with source and receiver devices on a strong Wifi signal from my Airport Extreme Base Station. As soon as I switched mirroring on, my iMac's desktop was downsized to 1920×1080 (which is itself curious, as I have an older, 720p-model Apple TV), and a mirror of all the windows on my primary display appeared on the TV. The display was a little fuzzy, so in accordance with Apple's instructions I used the Displays pane of System Preferences to set my screen to "best for Apple TV"; this set my iMac to 1280×720. Using the Mac desktop felt fairly smooth, although there was an unsurprising hint of lag on cursor movement. Playing back a high definition MKV video file in VLC looked sharp, but there was some jerkiness to the motion; it also made my iMac run powerful hot after less than ten minutes of use.

Windows on my secondary monitor weren't mirrored, which is probably what you'd expect (and almost certainly what you'd want). Of course, when I quit AirPlay Mirroring, all my windows were now crammed into the top-left of my screen as they had all been resized for the lower resolution. That's a pain.

Apple is probably careful to call it "AirPlay Mirroring" rather than "AirPlay" because it's missing the logical second feature: sending an AirPlay stream to be displayed on a Mac. Perhaps of less interest to owners of portable Macs, but my 27" iMac makes a pretty good secondary television, so I would find that functionality occasionally useful. If you would too, there are a number of third-party tools that you may find useful.

How valuable you find AirPlay Mirroring depends a lot on the sorts of things you do with your Mac. My wife and I have found having an Apple TV quite useful for the ability to easily share photos or videos with each other without huddling around an iPhone; it'd be nice to be able to do that from our MacBooks too. Sadly, both our portable Macs are too old for AirPlay's stringent hardware requirements.

All work and no play means Jack has less skeumorphic UI to endure

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Game Center is here. It still has that beyond-tasteless skeuomorphic UI, only now you can make it fill the screen of a 27" iMac if you really want to. It lets you compare achievements and high scores in supported games with a dedicated-to-Game-Center friends list, acts as a multiplayer hub for you to start games from, has in-game voice chat support in supported apps, and supports cross-platform gaming between iOS and OS X. It's not yet clear if achievements or rewards will sync between iOS and OS X versions of games, however; on the Talkcast this week, game publisher Gedeon Maheux said that he's not aware of a mechanism to handle that.

Game Center only works in supported games and as it's brand new there aren't many of those yet. In fact, as I write these words there is exactly one, Apple's venerable Chess; I expect more will appear soon. Dedicated "core" gamers will likely continue to feel it's a pale imitation of Xbox Live or Steam, but for the casual crowd it's perfectly fine. And that's all the news that's fit to print.

Maximum lockdown

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For a long time on the Mac malware scene, nothing happened. And then, without warning and despite speculation to the contrary, nothing continued to happen. There are still very few (although not zero!) credible malware threats that target OS X. This hasn't stopped Apple from doing something about it though, which is commendable. [In fairness, the logical time to install security cameras and deadbolts really is before the bandits and looters set up shop in the middle of town, not after. -Ed.] [I agree. I wasn't being sarcastic there, for a change! -RG]

The core change in Gatekeeper is an innocuous-looking setting in the Security & Privacy pane of System Preferences. You can set your Mac to run all software; only Mac App Store software; or software from the Mac App Store and "identified developers" by which Apple means developers enrolled in the Mac Developer Program who digitally sign their apps. The default is this last choice, whereas all OS X versions before Mountain Lion were equivalent to the first option.

This new setting confers extra protection. You can be reasonably confident that the Mac App Store has no active malware (or that any malicious app would be extremely short-lived there), so there's not much chance of infection on that front. Signed apps you download from anywhere on the web that are later found to be doing bad things can have their signing key revoked by Apple. This stops them from running on everyone's Macs.

On the face of it, it sounds like that middle option also means that none of your old software works, and that if you want to run just one unsigned app you're stuck having to turn it off. Fortunately, Apple thought of this. Gatekeeper stores a whitelist of apps that, even if they don't have the digital signature and even if you're using the "only run identified developers" default setting, will still run. By default, that whitelist contains every app that is on your system when you install Mountain Lion, so you won't immediately plagued by thousands of "this app is unsafe" messages the minute you upgrade.

If you download a new app, when you try to run it you get a "this app may be unsafe, so I'm not going to let you" message. However, you can get around this with a semi-obscure trick. If you right-click the app and select "Open" from the menu, you get a different dialog that allows you to open the app and add it to the whitelist.

Does this provide any meaningful extra security? Time will tell. If most users immediately switch to the most permissive setting, or if they become so accustomed to whitelisting apps that they don't stop to think before doing it, then arguably Gatekeeper will be of little value.

However, it's noteworthy than you can lock the Gatekeeper setting so it can only be changed from an Administrator account. This means it can provide a useful way to lock novice or untrusted users of your Macs to proven-safe software. System administrators of large Mac networks may appreciate that feature, as will parents and lab managers.

Gatekeeper isn't the only new trick that Security & Privacy knows. A new tab, Privacy, shows a comprehensive list of permissions granted by you to allow apps to access your data -- your current location, your contacts, your Twitter account, and so on. When you first load an app that needs access to this potentially confidential data, you get a notification dialog, and you can choose to forbid the app the access. It's another idea that's came over from iOS.

Some of the permissions are a little bizarre -- it wasn't clear to me why Apple's Pages word processor package was asking for me for access to my contacts -- but all in all it's a welcome change. I was initially concerned that Mountain Lion might start to feel a bit like Windows Vista's bothersome User Account Control nag-dialogs, but even during my first hours it wasn't particularly annoying and that quickly faded as I approved the apps I use regularly.

Everything old is new again

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As usual, Apple has also taken the opportunity to make a raft of improvements to the core system apps.

Safari has probably seen the most changes. It's faster, for a start; rendering webpages felt snappier than before. The old school split top bar -- where URL and search box were separate fields -- is gone, replaced by something Apple is calling the "smart search field" which offers unified URL and search string entry. It's a concept you probably recognize from Chrome and modern-day Firefox, although it dates back at least as far as 2008's AwesomeBar plugin for Firefox. It works great, although I'm not a fan of the new graduated blue "load progress" bar that runs in the background of the text field. For some reason I can't put my finger on I found it visually distracting in a way that the old one wasn't.

Tab management has some new options. There's the much-publicised iCloud sync, for one thing; every device signed in to your Apple ID can browse a list of all the open tabs open in any copy of Safari, whether it's another Mac or an iOS (6 or later) device. This is very useful for the "I know I left that page open on my Mac, but now I want to read it on my iPad and I can't find it" scenario.

There's also new gesture support and a new UI for tab selection, called Tab View. I was initially confused by the little button on the far right of the tab bar; it pops up a sort of slide-though-tabs-as-pages interface, not dissimilar to the iPhone's interface. I didn't immediately appreciate why this was any better than simply clicking the tab directly, until I realised that it's intended to be used by gestures.

A two-finger pinch zoom-out gesture, when the page is already at the normal zoom level, switches to Tab View. Two finger swipes left and right moves through your open tabs, and a pinching zoom-in gesture brings the selected tab to the foreground. It's slick, fast and feels natural. It really comes into its own when you have a lot of tabs open and the tab title has become too small to contain useful text.

Mail gets Notification Center support (of course), Share buttons (ditto), and the new "VIP" system, which behaves the same was as it does on iOS 6. You mark a given contact as a VIP, and they then appear in your special VIP Inbox; additionally, any conversation thread in any folder will have a little star (rather than the usual dot) if one of your VIP contacts has contributed to it. It's vaguely similar to Gmail's Priority Inbox feature except that Gmail attempts to guess your important contacts automatically and Apple requires you to select them manually. Depending on how well Google's guesswork does for you, that could be a good or a bad thing.

Mail also has a few other smaller tweaks. One I particularly liked was that clicking on the grey "sort by" bar at the top of any mail folder jumps up to the top immediately, just like tapping the clock on iOS does.

Preview gets iCloud document syncing, as does TextEdit, as previously discussed. Preview can also handle dynamic PDF forms, plus it has the ability to search notes and highlights you add to PDFs. Calendar and Contacts have some new UI elements, including a useful "group" column in Contacts, and they've both been renamed to match their iOS cousins (so no more "iCal" and "Address Book"). Launchpad has a new search field, but I won't be jettisoning Alfred for it any time soon.

Smaller stuff

There's a grab-bag of miscellaneous changes too, including some stuff that's been removed. Web sharing is ostensibly gone from the base Mountain Lion install, having been banished to the OS X Server add-on (which costs an extra $20). This is slightly annoying, as I don't need the rest of the server stuff but I do sometimes use Web Sharing. The underlying apache executable is still installed on Mountain Lion -- I could go to http://127.0.0.1 in a web browser on a fresh install of 10.8 and see the default "It works!" page -- but some parts seem to be missing, like support for the Sites directories under each user directory. I doubt it's anything that can't be fixed with a little hackery.

RSS support is gone from Safari and Mail, Software Update has been removed, although confusingly the menu entry is still under the Apple icon -- it just opens the Mac App Store instead, which is where all future OS X updates will come from. The official X11.app is gone, too, although the project lives on as the open source XQuartz.

Full screen mode has been made very slightly less annoying on multi-screened Macs; you can now choose which of your displays will be used for full screen apps. When you click the "full screen" button, the app expands to fill whichever monitor it's currently on, whereas previously it would always move to the "primary display" (i.e. the one with the Dock and menubar.) People using laptops docked to big monitors will be happy about this.

There's no sign of any more meaningful support, though, like being able to put one fullscreen app on each display; you still end up with one screen full of linen. Unless, that is, you're using a rare app that supports multiple screens in full screen mode -- Aperture is the only one I can think of that does, but it proves that it is a solvable problem.

Unfortunately I was unable to test Power Nap because it only works on very specific Macs -- Retina display MacBook Pros and Late 2010 (see below) or newer MacBook Airs (i.e. the ones that only ship with solid state drives). It promises to do three things while you Mac is in sleep mode: sync your emails and your iCloud data and documents, download updates to OS X (and possibly all Mac App Store apps; the documentation isn't clear), and perform Time Machine backups. As such, it's useful, though unlikely to change your life.

(UPDATE: At almost literally the last second, Apple updated the Mountain Lion Tech Specs page to remove support from the Late 2010 MacBook Air. It now requires a Mid 2011 or newer model.)

Time Machine has gained the ability to rotate backups between drives. Basically, you can now have more than one Time Machine disk attached; Mountain Lion will back up to all of them, seamlessly. This is useful if you want to keep one backup drive somewhere other than your house -- say, at a friend's or your workplace -- as your off-site backup. Online services like Crashplan make that seem a little old-fashioned, but the multiple-physical-disc approach still has value for people with a huge amount of data or very poor Internet connections.

Great OSs stick together

The overall impression I get from Mountain Lion is one of cohesion, on several fronts.

Apple is certainly bringing iOS and OS X closer together, at least superficially in terms of the user interface. Common elements like Notification Center and Share buttons are making these two very different operating systems start to feel like two sides of the same coin. That's a good thing, although I'll change my mind if Apple ever starts bringing the restrictions of iOS over as well. I believe this to be very unlikely, though.

iCloud syncing, both of documents and preferences, also brings greater cohesion to the process of using multiple devices, whether they are Macs or iOS or any combination of the above. As long as app support is there -- which is thin right now, admittedly, but it'll improve -- then access to your data is seamless. Having bookmarks, open tabs, email accounts, and all the rest sync between Macs is much appreciated.

Mountain Lion is certainly a worthy upgrade that, whilst it doesn't contain any life-changing upgrades over Lion, makes OS X a more productive operating system than ever before in a value-for-money package.

Apple just confirmed in its Q3 2012 earnings report that Mountain Lion is coming tomorrow. The hotly anticipated 10.8 version of OS X brings with it a host of new features, as we've expounded upon in the past. The upgrade will be just $19.99 (unless you've recently bought a new Mac -- in which case it'll be free) and will be available via download on the Mac App Store in 24 hours or less. Better start finding some disk space.

The big new features of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion like iMessage, Notification Center, Dictation, Facebook and Twitter integration, and AirPlay are getting all the attention. However, for me, the coolest stuff in major releases of OS X are always the little things one might not notice right away. And OS X Mountain Lion, with over 200 new features in all, has a lot of cool "little things" to look forwards to. Here's a few of them:

Rename documents from their title bar: Rename a document without leaving the app. Just click the filename in the title bar and choose Rename from the document menu.

Calendar sidebar is back: Click the Calendars button (in iCal) to keep a list of all your calendars accessible in a sidebar.

Address Book Groups column: Contacts includes a new groups column, which always gives you quick access to your contact groups.

Inline progress for downloads and file copies in Finder: When copying a file from a server or connected drive, you'll see its progress in the file's icon in the Finder. You can also cancel a copy in progress.

Inline find in Mail: Easily find a word or phrase in a message. As you type, Mail instantly highlights all occurrences of the text you're looking for in a specific message while dimming the rest of the message. The Find banner displays the number of results. Use the arrow keys to browse matches.

Fill out PDF forms in Preview: Preview lets you quickly fill out forms. It detects areas that are intended for text entry, such as underlining and boxes. Just click to add your text. And click to select checkboxes.

Search notes and highlights in PDF's: In Preview, search notes and highlights in a PDF document either by author or by content.

Do Not Track: Safari supports an emerging privacy standard called "Do Not Track." When you turn on Do Not Track or surf the web with Private Browsing, Safari asks the websites you visit not to track you online.

Improved scroll bars: Scroll bars in Mountain Lion expand when you hover the cursor over them, so it's easier to scroll a web page or document.

Go full screen on any display: If you have a secondary display connected to your Mac, you can take an app full screen on either display. Drag the window to the desired display and click the full-screen button.

Game Center-enabled Chess: Chess in Mountain Lion includes Game Center support so you can go head to head with your friends. Sign in to the Game Center app to see your achievements and track your progress.

As is often the case with Apple's hardware and software, it's the little things that make its products truly great (Come on! Game Center-enabled Chess.app?). The examples above are just a few of the ones taken from Apple's Mountain Lion Features page. Click on over to see the complete list of all 200+ reasons Mountain Lion is going to be the best OS X yet.

Apple is set to bring automatic app downloads to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion when it debuts later this summer. As noted by 9to5Mac, the latest build of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion only has a partially working Automatic Downloads feature, but users can expect to see a finalized working version when OS X 10.8 ships.

Automatic Downloads is currently a feature of iOS which allows the same app to be downloaded instantly on all a user's devices (iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad) no matter what device the user chooses to download the app on. The feature is an easy way to keep all your devices in sync with any new apps you may have purchased.

Automatic Downloads in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion could work in a similar manner. When you first download an app from the Mac App Store a notification will appear asking if you want to enable Automatic Downloads. Doing so will install any app purchased on the Mac App Store to any Mac that is logged in with the same Mac App Store account (provided those Macs are also running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion).

Automatic Downloads in Mountain Lion is just another way Apple is bringing the user experience of OS X and iOS closer to parity.

Apple developers test-driving the latest Mountain Lion (10.8) release may have noticed some higher-res graphics erroneously popping up in "unexpected places," such as the double-size phone icon that appears alongside an audio chat invitation in Messages. One such dev reported his findings to Ars Technica, as you can see evidenced in the graphic above. This mild slip-up could imply that Apple plans to release Macs with high-density displays later this year, or, at the very least, that Mountain Lion will be Retina-ready. High-res support dates back to OS X Lion, which is reportedly equipped to play nice with HiDPI displays, should they eventually become available. Compatible icons are but a second piece of the puzzle, which could be completed to the tune of deliciously dense 2880 x 1800 (or higher) resolution 15-inch LCDs. Wouldn't you love to see that.
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10.8appleapple displayappledisplaycinema displaycinemadisplaydisplaydisplayshigh reshigh resolutionhigh-reshigh-resolutionhighreshighresolutionlionmac osmac os xmacosmacosxmonitormonitorsmountain lionmountainlionosos 10.8os xos x mountain lionos10.8osxosxmountainlionretinaretina displayretinadisplayFri, 23 Mar 2012 11:09:00 -040021|20199809https://www.engadget.com/2012/03/16/apple-releases-mountain-lion-developer-preview-2/https://www.engadget.com/2012/03/16/apple-releases-mountain-lion-developer-preview-2/https://www.engadget.com/2012/03/16/apple-releases-mountain-lion-developer-preview-2/#comments

Exactly one month ago, Apple pulled back the kimono revealing its next Mac OS release would be called Mountain Lion upon its debut this summer. It also let eager developers registered in the Mac Developer Program partake in the fun a little early. For the latter camp, Cupertino's back with a second helping today, aptly named Developer Preview 2. No word yet on what's changed in build 12A154q -- a scant twenty-six builds from the 12A128p original -- as the accompanying release notes have yet to be updated. But rest assured we'll circle back with anything of interest when they do.

While Apple's Mountain Lion introduces Notification Center, a feature brought over from iOS that consolidates notifications in one organized pane, Somogyi correctly notes that "Mountain lions will not notify you before they pop-up and eat your face." I've never met a mountain lion face to face in the wild, but if they're anything like the utter bastard killing machines they were in Red Dead Redemption, Somogyi is absolutely right about that.

The whole chart is definitely worth a read and good for a laugh. Somogyi notes that the "low hanging fruit" would have been even riper for comedy if Apple had named the next version of OS X "Cougar" -- personally, I'm rather grateful Apple went with "Mountain Lion" instead.

With the many updates and new features announced for the upcoming OS X release of Mountain Lion, one may have slipped by, but it's an important feature. It's also likely to become controversial.

Gatekeeper gives users some extra security when running third party software. Apple says Gatekeeper will help prevent users from "unknowingly downloading and installing malicious software." The system preference has three levels of security. One only allows you to install apps from the Mac App Store. A second level allows installation of apps from what Apple calls "identified developers." Apple is starting up a program that basically allows developers to have digital signing of their apps. The lowest level of security allows apps to be installed from any source, but OS X will warn you if the app is not digitally signed.

What Gatekeeper doesn't do is protect you against malware and viruses, which admittedly have not been a big problem on the Mac platform. Apple does have some built in tools to identify potentially harmful programs, but sometimes the problems can get ahead of Apple implementing a solution. Of course, Windows faces similar challenges, but on a much larger scale.

Gatekeeper is in the recently released developer preview, but it is not activated. AppleInsider reports that it can be turned on by using the new OS X system policy control command-line tool "spctl(8)".

It will be interesting to see if Gatekeeper matures and adds features by the time Mountain Lion is released in late summer. We'll do a deeper dive on Gatekeeper and its possible implications for the Mac platform later on.

[Update: The original version of this article incorrectly conveyed the restrictiveness of the default security in this OS X update, and has been edited to reflect the scope of software affected. Joystiq apologizes for the error.]

Apple OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, which just started its "Developer Preview" period and will be released to the populous sometime this year, features a security protocol called Gatekeeper, which prevents unsigned applications from running, depending on user preferences. Gamasutra reports Gatekeeper is set to only allow applications from the Mac App Store and from developer who've registered with Apple.

This means that, for any games and apps made by designers who have not registered with Apple, you will have to adjust Gatekeeper's initial restrictions.

Since you can allow content from unidentified/non-App Store sources, it doesn't seem like the system itself is inherently malicious or anti-gaming. It is, however, prohibitive, and may affect off-store apps downloaded by users unfamiliar with Gatekeeper.
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10.8applegatekeepermacmac-app-storemountain-lionos-xosxosx10.8osx10.8-mountain-lionosx10.8mountainlionThu, 16 Feb 2012 20:00:00 -050011|20173679https://www.tuaw.com/2012/02/16/mountain-lion-to-move-software-update-to-the-mac-app-store/https://www.tuaw.com/2012/02/16/mountain-lion-to-move-software-update-to-the-mac-app-store/https://www.tuaw.com/2012/02/16/mountain-lion-to-move-software-update-to-the-mac-app-store/#comments

After OS X Lion was made available only via the Mac App Store, it created a somewhat confusing situation where Apple's own programs were updated via the standalone Software Update application while many third-party apps were updated via the Mac App Store. Mountain Lion eliminates this confusion and makes the Mac experience more like that on iOS devices; Mountain Lion users will have only one interface to reckon with when updating software components on their Macs.

Every new version of OS X comes with harsh news for owners of older Macs: "Your Mac is too old. You're stuck with your current OS. Forever." For Mac OS X Leopard in 2007, anyone who owned a Mac with a processor slower than 867 MHz was stuck with Tiger. In 2009, Snow Leopard made the biggest (and most controversial) shift yet and dropped support for all PowerPC Macs. In 2011, Lion dropped support for Macs that didn't have 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo processors, which included most of the first-generation Intel Macs.

MacBook Pros released prior to June 2007 (MacBookPro2,1, MacBookPro2,2)

The original MacBook Air (MacBookAir1,1)

The Mid-2007 Mac mini (Macmini2,1)

The original Mac Pro and its 8-core 2007 refresh (MacPro1,1, MacPro2,1)

Late 2006 and Early 2008 Xserves (Xserve1,1, Xserve2,1)

Update: It slipped my mind that there were two pre-unibody plastic MacBooks introduced between the aluminum MacBook and the plastic unibody redesign, both of them with the model identifier MacBook5,2. Those MacBooks, which still feature the legacy pre-unibody case design and were manufactured in early- to mid-2009, are supported in Mountain Lion because they feature an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics card instead of the integrated Intel GPUs in their predecessors.

If you're running Lion and not sure if your Mac is supported under Mountain Lion, go to the Apple Menu and select "About this Mac." Click "More Info," then click "System Report." You'll be presented with a window showing a Hardware Overview, and your Model Identifier will be the second entry from the top. If your Model Identifier matches the list above, then regrettably OS X Lion is the end of the road for your Mac.

The loss of support for all most pre-unibody plastic MacBooks and the first-gen MacBook Air are likely to come as a big shock to many Mac users; personally I know many people who own older pre-unibody MacBooks. Dropping support for these models in Mountain Lion appears to have something to do with the Intel integrated graphics processors from that era; no Mac with an Intel GMA 950 or Intel GMA X3100 graphics processor will be supported in Mountain Lion.

My Early 2008 MacBook Pro dodged the bullet... this time. I have a feeling many of you out there will not be so lucky, and I have a sneaking suspicion that OS X 10.9 will drop support for my Mac, too. It's rough news to be sure, but keep in mind that OS X Lion won't spontaneously combust once Mountain Lion goes live; even if your Mac is stuck with Lion for the rest of its operational life, you can still look forward to several more years of software support for your current OS.

Many media outlets got a sneak preview of Apple's next version of OS X, Mountain Lion, and the Wall Street Journal was no exception. The Journal was treated to a preview from Apple CEO Tim Cook himself. He discussed with the Journal the basic philosophy behind OS X updates going forward: "We see that people are in love with a lot of apps and functionality here," Cook says of the iPhone. "Anywhere where that makes sense, we are going to move that over to Mac."

Cook considers iOS and OS X as having "incremental functionality," which fits in with how Steve Jobs characterized the iPad at its 2010 introduction; the iPad is a stepping stone between the iPhone and the Mac, and OS X Lion was Apple's first step at bringing some of iOS's features to the Mac. Mountain Lion is merely the next iteration of that process.

"We took a logical pass at what the user is going to experience using these products to make it all make sense," Phil Schiller told the Journal in another interview. By changing the names of certain applications (Address Book to Contacts, iChat to Messages, iCal to Calendar, etc.) and bringing features like Notification Center, AirPlay, and iCloud document sharing to the Mac, Apple seems to have put consistency of experience at the forefront of its design goals. This is a smart move for Apple; with considerably more iPhone users than Mac users out there, creating a wholly integrated platform where iPhone users can sit in front of a Mac for the first time and feel instantly familiar with it is sure to drive Mac adoption even higher in the years to come.

Whether this convergence will also apply to hardware is another story. The Journal asked Cook if Macs will eventually run on the same ARM microprocessors as iOS devices, but Tim Cook gave a decidedly noncommittal "We think about everything. We don't close things off."

When the Journal mentioned Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 8 update, Cook shrugged it off. "I don't really think anything Microsoft does puts pressure on Apple," he said, calling any pressure that Apple may feel "self-induced." Indeed, the news about Mountain Lion comes at a time when Apple is the only major PC manufacturer experiencing positive growth in the industry; sales of non-Mac PCs have declined year-over-year, with some manufacturers experiencing steep losses in revenue.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is already available as a developer preview, and Apple says it will be available for sale in "late summer." Now that the company has the resources to do so, it appears to be committed to yearly upgrades for OS X on the Mac alongside its yearly upgrades to iOS.

You may still be purring your way through our in-depth preview, but Mountain Lion is now officially out of the bag, with Apple releasing a preview version of its latest OS X to the members-only Developer Program. If you're up to date on those $99/year dues, you can head on over to the Member Center to get your OS 10.8 fix, and start checking out those shiny new Messages, Reminders, Notes and Notification Center apps. Or kick up your feet and bring your desktop to the big screen with AirPlay Mirroring. If you have the Apple-approved credentials to proceed, you can find all that and more by making your way over to our source link just below.
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10.8airplayairplay mirroringairplaymirroringappleapple os xapple os x mountain lionappleosxappleosxmountainlionchinesedeveloperdeveloper centerdeveloper previewdevelopercenterdeveloperpreviewflickrgatekeeperhands-onicloudimpressionsioslionmacmac osmac os xmacosmacosxmessagesmountain lionmountainlionnotesoperating systemoperating systemsoperatingsystemoperatingsystemsosos xos x 10.8os x mountain lionosxosx10.8osxmountainlionpreviewreminderssafarishare sheetssharesheetsThu, 16 Feb 2012 09:54:00 -050021|20173153https://www.engadget.com/2012/02/16/apple-os-x-mountain-lion-10-8-in-depth-preview/https://www.engadget.com/2012/02/16/apple-os-x-mountain-lion-10-8-in-depth-preview/https://www.engadget.com/2012/02/16/apple-os-x-mountain-lion-10-8-in-depth-preview/#comments

You can bid farewell to the days of Apple's theatrical OS reveals -- at least until OS 11 rears its head, anyway. In the meantime, the outfit has seemingly been content to strip away more and more pomp and circumstance with every subsequent big cat release. Lately, the company has settled into an evolutionary release schedule, eschewing full-fledged makeovers in favor of packing in lots of smaller changes, many of them quite granular indeed. It's a trend that can be traced as far back as 2009's OS X Snow Leopard (10.6), a name designed to drive home the point that the upgrade wasn't so much a reinvention of the wheel as a fine tuning of its predecessor, Leopard.

The arrival of Lion (10.7), though, marked a full upgrade. With features like Launchpad and Mission Control, it seemed like it might be the last version Cupertino dropped before finally pulling the trigger on operating system number 11, and perhaps transitioning to something with an even stronger iOS influence. Right now, at least, the company's not ready to close the book on chapter X, but it is giving the world a first peek at 10.8. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Mountain Lion. %Gallery-147761%

iOS 5 is set to launch this Wednesday and the beta testers I've talked to say it's a monumental leap forward. iOS 5 adds over 200 features to an already polished mobile operating system, which is arguably the best on the planet.

However, that's not to say that Lion can't be improved. Apple only needs to look to iOS for further inspiration. Below is my list of five iOS features that I hope will migrate to OS X. Feel free to leave your requests in the comments.

I actually just added this one in because I know a lot of people have asked for it. Even paperback fans can't deny that ebooks are the future. Though they may not be quite up in Kindle territory, iBooks and the iBookstore are growing more popular by the day. While users can access their iBooks on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, there's no way to get them on the Mac...yet.

This is one area where Apple needs to take a play from Amazon. Kindle owners can read their books on the Kindle, the iPhone, iPad and Android phones, as well as with Mac and Windows apps and a web browser. While reading an iBook on a desktop might not be the platform of choice, it would be nice if iBooks users had the option. This is especially true for people who buy research or school books through iBooks and want to reference the book on the same screen as an assignment in progress.

The Notification Center is one of the big new features of iOS 5. It allows users to see all their texts, emails, news alerts -- nearly every kind of notification -- all in one place. Currently OS X relies on numbered icon badges to show users notifications on a per-app basis. And while there are third-party apps like Growl that do a good job at alerting users to notifications, a dedicated Notification Center would further solidify the link between iOS and OS X and make it easier for users to see the things they need to attend to all in one place.

The great thing about OS X's and iOS's Mail and Notes app is that a user's email messages and notes sync between iPhone and Mac. However, iOS 5 offers a dedicated Reminders app that allows users to set reminders with an impressive array of notification options.

While a dedicated Reminders app makes infinitely more sense on a mobile device, OS X Reminders integration would be a welcome feature. After all, many of us will use the app to set reminders for tasks to be completed at our desks. Why not be reminded by the computer we are working on?

I'm not suggesting a dedicated Reminders OS X app. But what I would like to see is the Reminders app features and UI built into OS X's Mail app, much like Notes is today.

[Note: Many readers have rightly pointed out that Reminders.app reminders are synced with iCal on your Mac. However, my take on it is that the array of ways to set reminders in the iOS app and the app's UI should be integrated better with OS X.]

FaceTime was perhaps the coolest feature of iOS 4. When it first came out it allowed iPhone 4 users to video chat with each other. Then Apple added iPod touch support and iPad 2 support. But, for me, FaceTime didn't become really useful until Apple released the FaceTime app for OS X. When they did, FaceTime brought unity to the entire Apple ecosystem (which, incidentally, is the common theme of all my feature suggestions in this article).

iMessage in iOS 5 is arguably cooler than FaceTime because many people text a heck of a lot more than video chat. iMessage is great because it allows free texting among iPhone owners. But what's even more impressive is that it also allows iOS users to text people on Wi-Fi-only iPod touches and iPads. Like FaceTime before it, the last piece of the puzzle is adding iMessages to OS X. It's a lot easier for me to reply to a text from my iMac while I'm working on it than to stop and pick up my iPhone.

Of course, the arrival of iMessage and FaceTime presents somewhat of a problem. I've had a lot of people who aren't the most Mac-savvy users say they are confused about the differences between FaceTime and iChat's video conferencing. If Apple would add an OS X iMessage app, that would probably only broaden the confusion ("Is an iMessage the same thing as an AOL IM?"). While I think Apple needs to absolutely add iMessage functionality to OS X, it needs to do so without adding more clutter and confusion to its messaging (be it IM, video, or texting) apps. Do they scrap iChat in favor of an iMessage app? Or do they add iMessage support to iChat? Dedicated apps are simpler, but all-in-one apps are more convenient. It's a tough call.

Siri, iOS 5's AI personal assistant, is the start of the future for smart phones. It takes dictation, and lets you do dozens of other things using only your voice. But it's not just voice recognition software. It's powerful AI that knows what you want based on syntax, history, and context. There are no rigid voice commands needed. You can talk to it like you do to a human being and it figures out what you want it to do.

Right now Siri is only available on the iPhone 4S. That's because it requires quite a bit of horsepower under the hood to accomplish its tasks. Or, quite a bit of horsepower for a phone. Every Mac sold today has more than enough memory and processing power to support Siri integration. And when Apple adds Siri to OS X it will be the start of a revolution in personal computing. Indeed it may one day even lead to the elimination of (or drastic reduction of) the keyboard and mouse. And don't get me started (yet) on a Siri-integrated Apple television set. Goodbye remote control. But first, let's get Siri into OS X.

Imagine being able to talk to your Mac like you do a person, saying things like:

"Pull up the Keynote for my April meeting."

"Take me to Apple's website."

"Revert to the Version that I was working on last week."

"Show me all the photos from my trip to Berlin."

"Organize all my Word files into a folder and then sort them into sub-folders based on month created."